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ted

The secret of happiness (from Daniel Kahneman and Jerry Seinfeld)

March 6, 2010

I am by day a mild-mannered Econ­o­mist, qui­etly cor­rect­ing stu­dents’ sup­ply and demand dia­grams, dis­cussing the long-term profit pos­si­bil­i­ties in oli­gop­o­lies. But by night, I get to pur­sue my real pas­sion in life: surf­ing –both chan­nel and web. Some­times I do both at once! So I live a pretty full existence.

Some­times on my quests, I unearth a jewel such as this pre­sen­ta­tion from Daniel Kah­ne­man, on our “expe­ri­enc­ing selves” and our “remem­ber­ing selves.” We expe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness, he explains, in the moment and also (often very dif­fer­ently) in our memory.

The two headed happiness-monster

Self-actualization is a process of rec­on­cil­ing these two selves: expe­ri­en­tial and remem­bered. They way this works is sim­i­lar to the les­son told by the ever-sagacious Jerry Seinfeld:

When it comes to Hap­pi­ness we’ve got the spon­ta­neous ‘Now Guy’ and story-teller ‘Then Guy’. Now Guy is your unso­phis­ti­cated, spon­ta­neous younger-self. He’s always got ideas about how to spend your life­sav­ings fly­ing to Vegas for a really wild week­end. But Mon­day morn­ing it’s Then Guy who has to explain the whole thing to your wife. A happy life requires the two to nego­ti­ate and agree.

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Practical Ingenuity

May 26, 2009

I like peo­ple who think design can change the world. Grow­ing up, I was hugely inspired by The Inge­nu­ity Gap –a book which explains why we must be excep­tion­ally cre­ative in our responses to prob­lems like cli­mate change and global ter­ror­ism if we are to stand a chance at solv­ing them. Here are two inspir­ing exam­ples of informed, cre­ative design.

The first is from Design that Mat­ters (DtM), a Boston-based charity: 

And here is the third TED pre­sen­ta­tion from Hans Rosling (his oth­ers are here and here, if you missed them). Rosling’s non-profit Gap Min­der, based in Swe­den, uses data visu­al­iza­tion (like the Tren­dal­izer) to make the world’s devel­op­ment sta­tis­tics understandable. 

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